How did Black Wolf Nation get started?
My brother (Alex) and I have been entrepreneurs together since we were 6 and 8 years old. We did a snow shoveling business. I remember it snowed a ton one day and we went out shoveling people’s walkways and we made $100 at 8 years old. That’s infinite money. It was a life-changing experience, and once we got a taste for it, we could never get enough.

Throughout the years, we sold Beenie babies together, sports memorabilia. We would order it online and sell it to kids in school. We did a car detailing business together. He and I got approached by someone local with a razor bump solution. He and I suffered with razor bumps as most 16- and 18-year-olds do. We tried the product; it was really great. He asked us if we would like to help him sell it.

And we thought, “Yeah, for sure. It’s a great product.” The problem is the packaging was awful. It didn’t smell that good, so when we tried to go to barber shops with it, no one was very excited about it.

Then what?
We thought “what if we made really cool bottles and a cool brand around it?” We approached the guy with the idea, which he thought was really stupid. And so, we thought we’d try to sell it on our own, and that was the impetus for us jumping into this space. We finally launched the business in September 2018. I was 22 at the time, Alex was 19. We had no prior e-commerce experience.

We were super young, but all we knew was we wanted to make this thing work. We had a vision. The men’s skincare space was exploding, but the problem was so many brands were so focused on how to get men to change habits and buy skincare like women have been buying skin care forever: lots of steps, heavy focus on ingredients. And we’re like, “No. What if we changed skin care to focus on the way men buy products?” We focused on simplicity, solution-focused, instead of ingredient-focused in terms of marketing, and when we launched it was an instant hit.

And now you’re a Forbes 30 Under 30.
My mother was very happy about it. My wife was very happy about it. It’s one of those things as an entrepreneur. We didn’t even have a PR firm back then. We were nominated by another entrepreneur and that was definitely a bucket list thing for me, and something you get to put in your bio.

Your company is called Black Wolf Nation.
What’s in a name? We knew we wanted to make something quintessentially masculine. My grandfather has the weird tradition where whenever one of us turns 13, he gives us a razor and shaving cream. His whole message is, no matter what you do, no matter who you are, if you look your best, you’d be surprised how much you can get accomplished. When you present yourself well, people take you more seriously. It’s a message he’s always had for us. So, we felt let’s name the company after him and his name is Wolf.

Do you feel Black Wolf Nation helps fill a void you had during your own search for skin care products as a teen?
I actually think the products existed out there. The problem for me when I was younger was, I didn’t know what to buy. It was very unclear. When you go into a store, there’s a sea of products. As an 18-year-old, I had no what that meant. And I just wished that there was a face wash in the store that said, “face wash for breakouts.” “Body wash for body acne.” Really products that were positioned for specific solutions that would take all the guesswork out for me. Even better than that, bundles and routines … 

I wish there would have been products like that when we were younger. That went into a lot of thinking when we were developing these products.